Shared meanings create institutions with real power. They also enable us to construct personal narratives that give our lives ...

We love to blame Darwin for the brutal side of capitalism, but the truth is messier, and a lot more interesting, than the ...

Meaning doesn’t stay inside individual brains. Shared attention and language allow meaning to become symbolic, social, and cumulative.

Google DeepMind researchers have introduced ATLAS, a set of scaling laws for multilingual language models that formalize how ...

A large comparative study of primate teeth shows that grooves once linked to ancient human tooth-picking can form naturally, while some common modern dental problems appear uniquely human.

Every time we speak, we're improvising. "Humans possess a remarkable ability to talk about almost anything, sometimes putting words together into never-before-spoken or -written sentences," said ...

The evolutionary adaptation of the left inferior frontal gyrus is considered a crucial neural specialization supporting the emergence of human language. As a central node in the language network, it ...

Language models are increasingly deployed in interactive online environments, from personal chat assistants to domain-specific agents, raising questions about their cooperative and competitive ...

In a re-evaluation of Hockett’s foundational features that have long dominated linguistic theory—concepts like ‘arbitrariness’, ‘duality of patterning’, and ‘displacement’—an international team of ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...

ANN ARBOR—For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ...

A groundbreaking international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically ...